The Great Batsby
by Vincent Armone
Summary: Thanks to F.Scott Fitzgerald for writing this master piece and for hopfuly not turning over in his grave at my version lol


CHAPTER 1

The Great Batsby

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

When you feel like criticizing anyone," but a smile on their face he told me, "just remember, that all the people in this world are not as nuts as you."

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that so when he sliced my face from ear to ear I was not angry but grateful. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments', a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran lunatics. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in the so called normal person, and so it came about that in Arakum I was unjustly accused of being a joker, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, untamed men. Most of the confidences were unsought- I don't sleep, preoccupation or hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was laughing at me on the horizon-for the giggling revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express their giggles are usually plagiaristic of me and marred of infinite insanity. Reserving judgments' is a matter of false hope. I am still afraid of missing something if I forgot that, as my father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishly repeat a sense of chaos is parceled out equally at birth.

And after boasting this way of my intolerance, I come to the admission that I am a joker. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from Arakum last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in a uniform of purple red and green and at a sort of immoral attention forever; I wanted more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into torn out bleeding human hearts. Only Batsby the so called man, who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction- Batsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If justice is an unbroken series of successful gesture, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promise of justice, as if he were related to superman of planet Krypton millions of miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with just wanting to be a hero who is dignified under the name of "gets a life"- it was because some whack job like me killed his parents, it's like a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No – Batsby turned out all right at the end, it is what preyed on Batsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporality closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men.

My family were all nuts, crazy bastereds who spent most of their lives locked up at Arakum for generations. The Napier's are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we are descended from the bowels of hell itself, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfathers brother who came to Gotham in 1895, killed a man because he looked at him funny and stole his farm and wife.

I never saw this great- uncle but my smile I am told is just like his- with special reference to the rather hard- boiled painting that hangs in the warden's office at Arkum. I was released from prison in 2008, a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that little back breaking incident with a good friend of mine bane. I enjoyed that so much that after it was over I was very restless. Instead of being king of the world my universe seem to be on the ragged edge of the collapse - so I decided to stir up another shit storm and went into business with the mob. Everybody I knew was in the mob so I supposed it could support on more deranged man. All my fellow criminals and I talked it over as if they were choosing a prep- school for me and finally said " why- yes" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year at three percent interest, and after various delays I went into the mob business, permanently, I thought, in the spring of 2009.

The practical thing was to find a safe house in the city, but Gotham police and Batsby were cracking down on crime and there was no way I was going back to the can, so when a young criminal from Copplepots family suggested that we take a house together in a nearby slum it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at sixty a month, but at the last minute he was gunned down in a drive by and I went to the shithole alone. I had a dog, at least I had him until he went ape shit and tried to tear my throat out, so I had to cave the side of his head in, and an old hooker, and a crack whore who looked like sticks with skin got my food and drugs and muttered lines from Bevis and butthead to herself over her crack pipe.

It was lonely for a day or so until one day Edward Nigma stopped by his questions were welcome but madding, how do you cross a street with no legs he kept asking, with just a shake of my head I looked at him hopeless.

I told him. You take someone else legs and from then on I was no longer lonely. He was my guide, a serious fucking loon, an original hard ass. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the city and how it's our oyster.

And so with the sound of screaming and the great bursts of gunfire- just like in the movie heat- I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the slaughter.

There were so many drug dealers and bookies I could shake down, just who the fuck were they going to run to, so I started to get everyone in line. I bought a dozen automatic machine guns, and stashed millions of dollars in safe deposit boxes all over the city. And I had the high intention of starting a meth lab in my basement if I could find a guy who would sell me propane in bulk under the table. And now I was almost ready to bring back a crime spree to Gotham the likes of which they had not seen in years. This isn't just an epigram- life is much more successfully looked at from a single window with a snipers rifle after all.

It was a matter of chance that I was living in a house in one of the worst parts of Gotham. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of Gotham and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of cats ears, identical in contour and separated only by a black leathery bay, jut out into the filthiest body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great polluted junk heap of Gotham Island Sound. They are not perfect cats ears, like the ears in that insane cat in the hat book- but their physical resemblance must have Doctor Seuss rolling over in his grave. I lived in the left ear, the – well, the more shit part of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was a light wind from falling over, only fifty yards from the sludge and oil slicks, and squeezed between two huge abandoned nuclear power plants, with god knows how many unspent rods left in there rotting reactors. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard- it was an almost duplicate of the ones on Three Mile Island, with a huge chunk missing from its upper left hand corner. Once spanking new this once great power source is now a living breathing testament to man kinds lust for greed and its rape of the green world upon which it sits. It was Batsby secret lair. Or rather, as I did not know that information until later on that it was inhabited by my arch enemy. My own house was like looking at dog shit after you stepped in it, all smashed and smelly, but I had a view of the dead fish, a partial view of my neighbors wife, who would always walk around nude with her huge big fat mother fucking tits banging all over the place. All this for sixty dollars a month what a god dam steal life was good.

Across the dyeing bay the lights of Gotham shined bright and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove to Selene Kyle's house to have a talk about a torch job I was planning in Gotham for the week after next. Selene like me was introduced to crime not of her free will, being pushed out of a fifteen story window will have its strange affects on people, and after the bane incident I had spent two days with her locked in the throes of passion. Now married believe it or not, her husband Al among his various accomplishments, has been one of the most powerful mob bosses in the country- a national figure in a way, one of those men who just by looking at you can cause your bladder to explode in fear, one of those men who reach such an acute excellence at thirty five that everything afterwards savors of anti-climax. His family was enormously wealthy – even in college his skill with a knife and his willingness to use it were legend. And know he lived in Gotham in a fashion that rather took your breath away; for instance he brought a string of polo ponies for his nieces birthday one year, after the little girl was done riding for the day, he bashed their brains in with a bat, just to show her that life is not fair, and that only the strong survive. And I thought I was a crazy fuck, this guy was slowly becoming my idol.

Why he chose Gotham, well the level of criminals is unmatched and if it were not for Batsby Gotham would be the Aruba for the wicked. He had spent a year in France, but those French fucks were like watching paint dry, so he drifted here were people were not above licking the corn from your ass for kicks. This was a permanent move, said Selene, my ball quivered with delight I could hardly believe it, I had a sight into Selene heart and I felt that maybe Al days were numbered, maybe I could help that along sending him to some dramatic turbulence never to be seen again.

And so it happened that on a smog chocked evening I drove my rusted out shit box over to see my old girl friend whom I still lusted for after all these years. Her house in Gotham was even more elaborate than I could have expected, a dark dreary mansion with a porch overlooking a growing lawn, and a front door that looked from the naked eye to be about twenty feet high. Al with what looked to be a nine millimeter strapped to his side was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

Like I said he was a sturdy man, black haired, and hard as a rock, two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his clothes could hide the enormous power of the body- he seemed to fill his shoes until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscles shifting when his shoulders moved. It was a body capable of enormous damage- a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added the impression of fear he conveyed. There was a touch of the devil in it, even toward the people he liked- and there was not to many of those he liked in Gotham, and quite a few how hated him back, hated his guts. "Now, just don't think of me as a stone cold killer just because I do not let my enemies linger, killing them quick is the human thing to do, plus we are in the same society and as you wish to step up in my world I see no such problems occurring if you follow the rules, you catch my drift old boy. I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to join him, instead of branching out on my own, to this like I always do I smiled, but underneath I seethed with hate.

We talked for a few minutes, and then he hit me with it. I've got a place for you here in my organization if you so desire, he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub nose car that lay parked off to one side of a enormous garage. It belonged to a man who is sadly no longer with us, may god rest his soul he said with a sneer, he turned me around again, politely and abruptly, let's go inside. We walked through a high hallway into a room that smelled like damp cat litter, fragilely bound into the house by shuttered windows at either end. The window were closed and from the look of them hardly ever opened. The windows were dirt streaked and seemed to be crying against the pungent smell of cat urine floating through the house, like a fresh baked cake waiting to be consumed.

The only other object in the room was an enormous couch on which my dear Selene sat with another woman of a complex nature. They were both in black leather and its fabric clung to their blossoms in a way that would bring a lesser man to his knees. I must have stood there in amazement for a few minutes listening to the boner expand in my pants. Then there was a boom as Al Buchanan shut the bathroom door with a heated slam, and the smell went out of the room and the two women rose in silence.

The other women I did not know. But she stirred my loins, and banging her was slowly creeping into my mind. Completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it- indeed I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

Selene came forward and slowly grabbed my balls she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression-then she whispered, an absurd, charming little whisper, happy to see you too, and we both laughed too and she led me into the room by my crotch.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

I can see that and she laughed again, as if she were a lioness with her prey, and she held my balls for a moment longer, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see, that was the way she nestled my balls. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Gordon. (I've heard it said that Selene's murmur was only to make men lean towards her so that she could feel there erection toward her, a charm that had men lining up to meet her.)

At any rate Miss Gordon had a perfect pair of blow job lips, and she nodded to me like if we can sneak away for a minute she would suck the chrome off my trailer hitch. A fart arose from my anal lips and softly I apologized to all those offended.

I looked back at Selene who was laughing in a riotous fit; it was the kind of fit that the ears follow up and down as if laughing is an arrangement of notes. Her face was lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth- and there was a set of tits on her that men would kill for, a compulsion in them, a hey look at me vibe, slowly she said to me listen I think Al is gay, the excitement in me dropped and I looked at her with eyes that were tearing for her, it's okay she said I hope he does like men this way I can spend more time with you. Exciting things hovered in the next hour and my journey into the mob had begun.

To be continued


End file.
